Horror and humor

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 57, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 145-160

  Carroll, Noël ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249378611     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/432309     Document Type: Review

References (43)

1. Helmuth Plessner, Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior, trans. James Spencer Churchill and Marjorie Grene (Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 72-73
2. Walpole himself described the work as a mixture of "buffoonery and solemnity" in the "Preface to the Second Edition" of The Castle of Otranto (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1963), p. 21
3. For an analysis of The Castle of Otranto, see Paul Lewis, Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor in Literature (SUNY Press, 1989), pp. 116-119
4. Donald F. Glut, The Frankenstein Legend (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1973), p. 33
5. Stuart Gordon, as interviewed in Dark Visions, ed. Stanley Wlator (New York: Avon, 1992), p. 84
6. Robert Bloch, as interviewed in Faces of Fear, ed. Douglas Winter (New York: Berkeley Books, 1985), p. 22
7. Edgar Allan Poe, "American Prose Writers, No. 2: N. P. Willis," Broadway Journal no. 3, January 18, 1845
8. Sigmund Freud, "The 'Uncanny,'" in Studies in Parapsychology (New York: Collier, 1963), pp. 19-62
9. E. Jentsch, "Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen," in Psychiatrischneurologische Wochenschrift, numbers 22 and 23, 1906
10. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: Macmillan, 1911)
11. The notion that problems of perceptual indiscernibility are the hallmark of philosophical inquiry is advanced by Arthur Danto in his Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Harvard University Press, 1981)
12. I am not fully convinced that we should construct a theory of horror that includes these psychotics. Thus, what follows above is a conditional extension of the theory that I presented in The Philosophy of Horror under the presumption that the theory should be expanded to accommodate certain psychotics. So, if one wishes to count The Silence of the Lambs as a horror fiction, the above account suggests how that might be done in a way that is maximally consistent with my Philosophy of Horror. A similar approach can be found in Peter Penzoldt, The Supernatural in Fiction (London: Peter Neville, 1952), p. 12
13. and S. T. Joshi, The Weird Tale (University of Texas Press, 1990), p. 80
14. My theory of horror is elaborated in The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990)
15. This paragraph repeats an argument that I made in Noel Carroll, "Enjoying Horror Fictions: A Reply to Gaut," The British Journal of Aesthetics 35 (1995): 67-72
16. I have characterized the relation of fear and disgust above as a complex compound because horror does not merely involve the simple addition of these two components. Horror is not simply the result of adding danger to impurity. For when elements that are independently harmful and impure are yoked together by horrific iconography, the impurity component undergoes a change. It becomes fearsome in its own right. That is, the impurity element comes to be fearsome in itself. It is as if the impurity comes to be, so to speak, toxic. The fearsomeness component in horrific imagery works like a chemical agent in activating or releasing a dormant property of the impurity. It catalyzes the impurity component. The impurity of the monster becomes, in addition to being merely disgusting, one of the fearsome properties of the monster. In Alien, when the creature bursts out of the egg, it is fearsome because of its evident power and speed. But the fearsomeness of the creature in light of its power and speed also encourages us to regard its squishy carapace as dangerous in its own terms. You wouldn't want to touch it for fear that it might contaminate you. Horror, then, is not simply a function of fear in response to the overt lethal capacity of the monster to maim plus disgust in response to the monster's impurity. For when fear and disgust are mixed in horror-provoking imagery, what is disgusting becomes additionally fearsome in its own way. Call this process toxification. This process of toxification, moreover, is important theoretically. For one of the things that happens, as we will see in the next section of this essay, is that when fear is subtracted from potentially horrific imagery-as happens in much comedy-the imagery becomes detoxified. This is why what I call category jamming is not a sufficient condition for a horrific response. Impure, incongruous entities can be presented detoxified, so to say, as is the case in much humor. Lastly, the phenomenon of toxification is important because it suggests a way in which I might be able to answer a recent criticism of my Philosophy of Horror. In the process of answering what I call the paradox of horror, I maintained that being horrified is unpleasant and that the pleasure we derive from horror fictions comes from elsewhere (notably from our fascination with the design of the monstrosity along with certain recurrent forms of plotting). Berys Gaut, in contrast, argues that the pleasure derived from horror fictions comes from being horrified. One of the ways that Gaut defends this view is by pointing out that even if being horrified is necessarily typically unpleasant, this is consistent with some people sometimes taking pleasure from being horrified. These will be atypical people in atypical situations. And horror audiences, by hypothesis, are of this sort. Responding to this proposal, I argue that it is strange to regard either the responses of horror audiences or the situation of being art-horrified by horror fictions to be atypical. Indeed, I contend that the situation of being art-horrified by horror fictions is the norm, since we are rarely, if ever, horrified, in the sense of art-horror, anywhere else but in response to horror fictions. In ordinary experience there are no monsters. So we have little recourse in real life to be horrified in the sense that I use that term. But Gaut questions my claim that we rarely, if ever, experience the relevant sort of horror in real life. He maintains that we often experience fear and disgust separately. So, if horror is the result of merely conjoining fear and disgust, then there is no reason to suppose that they might not be experienced together with respect to some object in real life. However, in response to Gaut, I would like to argue that what I call horror involves the toxification process discussed in the first paragraph of this note. Thus, art-horror involves fear (divorced from impurity), disgust, and, as a consequence of the mixture of these two elements, a third element, viz., fear-of-toxification. This emotion, particularly with regard to the impression of toxification, is not typical in ordinary life. It is primarily an artifact of the horror genre. So, it does not seem right to characterize the horror audience as atypical with respect to art-horror. Rather, they are definitive of it. Therefore, Gaut cannot exploit the typicality operator, in the way that he suggests, in order to dissolve the paradox of horror. See: Berys Gaut, "The Paradox of Horror," The British Journal of Aesthetics 33 (1993): 333-345
17. Berys Gaut, "The Enjoyment Theory of Horror: A Response to Carroll," The British Journal of Aesthetics 36 (1995): 284-289
18. and Carroll, "Enjoying Horror Fictions: A Reply to Gaut" (see note 13 above)
19. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966)
20. and Edmund Leach, "Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse," in New Directions in the Study of Language, ed. Eric H. Lenneberg (MIT Press, 1964), pp. 23-63
21. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, part I, chap. 6
22. Francis Hutcheson, Reflections on Laughter (Glasgow, 1750)
23. reprinted in John Morreall, ed., The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor (SUNY Press, 1987), p. 32
24. James Beattie, "On Laughter and Ludicrous Composition," in his Essays (Edinburgh: Creech, 1776)
25. William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Comic Writers (London: George Bell, 1850)
26. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson (Princeton University Press, 1941)
27. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R. B. Haidane and John Kemp, 6th ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1907), book I, section 13
28. Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (London: Hutchinson, 1964)
29. D. H. Monro, Argument of Laughter (Melbourne University Press, 1951)
30. John Morreall, Taking Laughter Seriously (SUNY Press, 1983)
31. Michael Clark, øHumor and Incongruity,ø Philosophy 45 (1970): 20-32
32. Adapted from Mel Brooks. See Joshua Halberstam, Everyday Ethics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), p. 83
33. Noël Carroll, "On Jokes," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 16 (1991): 280-301
34. Wolfgang Zucker, "The Clown as the Lord of Disorder," in Holy Laughter, ed. M. C. Hyers (New York: Seabury, 1960)
35. Don Handelman, Models and Mirrors: Toward an Anthropology of Public Events (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 247
36. Don Handelman, Models and Mirrors: Toward an Anthropology of Public Events Ibid., p. 242
37. Pnina Werbner, "The Virgin and the Clown," Man, n.s. (1986): 21
38. Paul Bouissac, Circus and Culture: A Semiotic Approach (Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 165
39. This routine can be seen on Great Comedians: TV-The Early Years, which is distributed by Goodtimes Home Video Corp., 401 5th Avenue, New York, New York (Goodtimes Home Video Corp., 1987; Movietime Inc. Archives, 1986)
40. Mary K. Rothbart, "Incongruity, Problem-Solving and Laughter," in Humour and Laughter: Theory, Research and Applications, eds. Antony J. Chapman and Hugh C. Foot (London: John Wiley and Sons, 1976), pp. 37-54
41. See also Mary K. Rothbart and Diana Pien, "Elephants and Marshmallows: A Theoretical Synthesis of Incongruity-Resolution and Arousal Theories of Humour," and "Psychological Approaches to the Study of Humour," in It's A Funny Thing, Humour, eds. Antony J. Chapman and Hugh C. Foot (New York: Pergamon Press, 1977), pp. 37-40 and 87-94 respectively
42. Rothbart's work is also discussed by Paul Lewis in his book Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor in Uterature (SUNY Press, 1989), chaps. 1 and 4
43. Mary Rothbart, "Laughter in Young Children," Psychological Bulletin 80 (1973): 247-256